


I saw the future unfold (in silver and gold)

by Clubsheartsspades



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, I'm getting this out before s5 has a chance to ruin it, Jon is trying to have an okay day and the Eye lets him, Martin makes tea but it's not tea until it is, actually no too many metaphors in general because that's just my writing style, because I suck at writing serious stuff, but it's just Jonah trying out his powers over the apocalypse and failing, not beta read we die like Tim, the Eye isn't actually that bad, too many metaphors in like the second half of this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-01
Updated: 2020-04-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:20:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23422333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clubsheartsspades/pseuds/Clubsheartsspades
Summary: Watching over his new world takes a lot more out of Jonah than he thought it would. His eyes hurt - all of them at once - it becomes harder and harder to See, his questions hold no power anymore. It is, of course, because the world changes, Jonah just has to get back to his roots, find statements, stories, human fear to hold himself and his powers together. It's that easy, it has always been that easy.Somewhere, not that far away actually, Jon can't stop Knowing. Maybe because he doesn't try to resist anymore.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Comments: 14
Kudos: 60





	1. Silver

**Author's Note:**

> The only reason I'm referring to Jonahelias as Jonah is because Elias ends with an s and I'd have to remember not to type "Elias's" every time I use the genitive and I always forget

Jonah Magnus thought himself a smart man. One of the smartest, actually, seeing as he had found a way to go through with a ritual, something he – and all the other avatars, too – had dreamt of for so long. The sky stared, it Saw and Watched, and Jonah was just waiting for his time, to surface as the sole ruler from the chaos of fourteen fears, all emerging from the beyond, all following his command. He was the Eye’s chosen avatar. A former human, too smart for time to catch. He had waited and watched and collected knowledge for so long, it felt like an eternity. Maybe that was just right. Maybe that was, after all, what the Eye wanted to gift him with; an eternity of rulership over the other avatars, those little servants of their own, lesser patrons, that never quite managed to see the whole, to figure out how to fulfil their dreams of a new world.

Maybe that was just what awaited him.

Jonah stood, staring with all his eyes fixed on the sky. It was a nightmare to every human in the city. Clouds swirled in mismatched colours, broke apart and bled into each other until they mixed to colours that weren’t real, poured into shapes that didn’t exist. The sky itself was a deep crimson at dusk and dawn but opened into a burning endlessness – Jonah was not entirely sure the sky belonged to the Vast anymore – for the day. It hurt to look at it for too long. It hurt even Jonah, but he looked nonetheless.

It was, after all, his world.

For a moment he let his mind wander. He Saw them, humans, shivering, smelling of fear like wounded prey smelled of blood. They huddled closer together, fearing and craving comfort all the same, for they could not trust the people closest to them anymore. The Stranger had its ways with their feeble minds, as did the Spiral. The Dark still hid in shadows, but all was so dark and all was so fragile that even in daylight – it wasn’t really day anymore, just brighter, just a little less dead as the End seemed to have claimed the night as well as the Dark had – every object, every body that threw shades was in danger of long black phantom limbs to stretch out and snatch and take everything they reached.

Jonah drank it all in. He enjoyed the world the way it was now. It had an aura of, well, fear. Everything was wrong in all the right ways, everything was undeniable his.  
The knock was what brought him back to his office.

It was a harsh sound. Demanding his attention in all the wrong ways. Jonah’s mind was spread out all over the city, carrying farther and farther to see more and take in all of the overwhelming fear, to See and finally – finally – Watch like he had always longed to…

Another knock and Jonah snapped back to himself.

He didn’t get to snap at whoever had interrupted him in his Watching, the door opened slowly, cautiously, but nobody entered.  
Jonah sighed, threw one last glance at the nightmare-like sky, then said loudly and with clear annoyance in his voice: “I’m not in the mood for games, _Michael_.”  
The door hung open, but no answer was given. It wasn’t as sickly yellow as the doors the distortion had used up until now. A new way of luring people into its hallways, Jonah was sure.

With his mind, he reached out again, not over London this time, just outside his office, just to make sure Michael wouldn’t take one too many of those who he still considered his. He had always been fiercely protective of all that worked for the institute, more so now as more and more avatars came to be.  
He remembered, with a somewhat fond smile, the day Jon had joined the institute. Now, with the earth bleeding, plastic mannequins walking the streets like humans, and cars spontaneously turning into swarms of skittering bugs nobody could identify, Jonah nodded to himself. He came this far, managed to do what nobody ever could. This world was his. He just waited for the Eye to crown him so that little annoyances like Michael couldn’t play their games with him anymore.  
The door still hung open. And Jonah still didn’t know who had opened it.

Didn’t he… but Jonah had just tried to… see?

Once again, more forcefully, pushing, he stretched his mind. He Saw his office door from the hallway for a moment. Nobody waited there, nobody walked away. So, he reached further, to Rosie’s desk, down the stairs even, but found nothing, nobody there.

Nothing.

Jonah lost his breath. His sight blurred when a shiver rocked through his body. Bees and wasps and hornets buzzed in his head, filled his ears with static, white and restless, keeping him from pulling his mind back to himself. With an audible snap – it wasn’t, not really, but oh, Jonah heard it in his ears even through the white noise, through all the pins and needles piercing his head from the inside out – his sight broke, shattered like pottery in a kiln. His eyes shut on their own, burning, watering, hurting from their simple existence in a body that wasn’t his.

A body that had been his for so long, it had forgotten that something was so very fundamentally wrong.

A body that had forgotten what it had fought against, but now with the world in shambles it remembered. For a second, for a moment between heartbeats, Elias Bouchard surfaced – or whatever was left of him. Then the moment was over, Jonah’s presence strangled him. His eyes lay heavy in his head like the glass eyes of a taxidermy model on display. Unmoving. Dead.

Jonah took a breath too greedily and swallowed air. It ran through his lungs like a hot knife, icy liquid that dripped into his body without ever losing its burning cold.  
His door closed.

The Spiral shouldn’t be able to do… That. Not to him. Nobody could sever the connection he had to the Eye. He was to be the new ruler of this new world, this new beginning.

Jonah steadied himself with one hand on the wall. His breathing slowed down, a drop of sweat dripped from his chin.

“How… funny”, he said, his voice barely above a whisper. None of this was even remotely funny.

One last time, he shook his head, clearing it from the soft buzzing, the feeling of cotton clouding his thoughts. It didn’t go away. Instead he went to tug at his cuffs as if they needed adjusting. As if that would do anything.

Jonah walked over to the now closed door, his face as impassive as possible when he opened it again. Nothing could affect him anymore. The Eye was watching over him.

The hallway, as before, was empty.

Nobody waited here, there was no place to hide. And even if they tried, Jonah could always See them. He did it then. See.

Rosie sat at her desk, but nobody else was here. There was a steady buzzing of people down in research and artefact storage. The beginning of the new world had… awoken some of the things stored there. It became more and more dangerous to leave it to his employees. Jonah Saw them struggling, but for now he was content to just Watch. One day, if it was really necessary, he could look into it. Today, it was a problem for the future.

Still, the institute was one of the safest buildings in London. Probably the entire world. The Eye protected him. And Jonah protected his institute.

With a quick step, he was back in his office, closing the door behind him. What he had felt before, the tugging and buzzing, that sudden pain of losing himself and failing to grasp at his own consciousness, it didn’t worry him. It shouldn’t. The world was changing. And so was he.

Coming into power had hurt. Receiving more power must hurt as much, more even. And the gratitude of something like the Eye had to be a burning sensation of both; pain and power all the same.

He settled down behind his desk with his hands on the armrests of his chair. His mind already stretching out again, eager to See what was happening in London’s streets, to find and Watch as he had done so often and for so long it was second nature by now.

Humans, at least the mortal ones, had their problems with understanding the great forces that now roamed their world. They hid from their fear, unknowing that embracing it could save them – not necessarily their loved ones, oh no. But who needed more family than their patron.

Jonah relaxed a little. He didn’t find any point to linger on, his mind wandering on, dancing around people, leaving them behind to go further, spread wider, thinner. Until he didn’t see anything anymore. Until his mind was laid out, his eyes staring unblinkingly, unseeing. Once again static hit him.

White pain sizzled in his head, water on hot stone, burning flesh and bone. His ears buzzed with the shivering wings of insects. He had spread his mind too thin, was too far away from safety to come back in one piece.

Fear had a specific taste, Jonah had never read statements like his Archivists had, but he knew the taste nonetheless. Sour and sharp. Hurtful. Never gentle, never like a careful hand feeding a child. Always forceful, always like a frantic hand grabbing as much as possible, stuffing his mouth up with sour sharpness that made bile rise in his throat. But Jonah had always taken what the Eye had given him. Knowing that it would pay off, that he’d be payed back for his loyalty. He had never Known it. Expected it. He had heard the music, trying to replicate it through the distortion between worlds.

Now Jonah burned up under the pressure of all the fear, of all the Fears in this world. He had tried to See, had fancied himself more than the simple Watcher that he was.

Jonah Magnus thought himself a smart man. And in a last burst of pain, of buzzing bugs in his ears, and flames melting his skin, of earth in his lunges and too much air on his lips, of darkness and death and desperation, he found himself the fool he had been all along.

Finally, in a last effort, his last drop of faith in his patron – his god – Jonah Knew.

The Eye did not protect him. It wasn’t Looking. He had given it a world, had opened all doors that had formerly been locked shut, had fed it fear over years and years and years. And it did not care. It would never protect him. Jonah was all alone in a hell he had created himself. He closed his burning eyes, his tears cut through his cheeks, splitting skin and boiling his blood.

And for the first time in two hundred years Jonah saw nothing.


	2. Gold

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Something very soft because I think Martin deserves some tea

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This started as "I hate Elias so much someone stab him" and ended with "Local Archivist gets an omnipresent fear god to understand feelings”

Jon watched Martin stare at the steeping teabag. After the “definitely not tea” Martin had taken to figure out when exactly it had turned to tea and turned back to not tea again. It was useless to spend his time on watching something that was definitely not a teabag steep in hot water. Ridiculous. Jon loved him for it.

“This time”, Martin mumbled underneath his breath. “This time. Surely.”

With the careful movement of someone disabling a bomb, Martin removed the teabag, staring at the tea cup intently. When the bag was dumbed in the sink, a dull wet thump sounded, the cup rattled on its saucer.

Martin picked the tea up. Careful. Then put it on the table behind him so that both he and Jon could study it – Martin from the open kitchen, Jon from the couch where he perched on the armrest even though Martin kept telling him he’d wear the cloth down like that.

“It’s tea.”

“No, Martin, it’s not.”

True to Jon’s words the tea cup shivered again. A long hairy leg and a long hairy tail surfaced, reaching over the rim of the cup. In a swift motion, Martin threw the not tea into the sink, where the not teabag was trying to eat a sponge.

“Whose are those anyway?”

Jon let himself fall backwards onto the sofa. The outside screamed and howled, something flew by, somewhere someone without a name died – what a pretty little lie he told himself, they all had names, Jon knows them, all the names.

“Seriously!” Martin huffed, clearly annoyed, while he flapped with a kitchen towel in a futile attempt to keep the not tea and the not teabag from fighting each other in their kitchen sink.

“Don’t know.” Jon watched Martin without seeing him. He just Knew. It was as easy as breathing these days and felt as necessary. Especially when Seeing involved Martin.

“Spiral?”, Martin tried again. “Or maybe Stranger? They have a thing with mismatching pairs of legs.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t talk about them. You know how it is with avatars. We just turn up when we’re least welcome.”

The flapping of the kitchen towel stopped, the faint hissing and the scrambling of mismatched feet in the sink didn’t.

“Jon…” But Martin didn’t continue. Scrabbling and hissing, rustling of fabric, screams from outside. And in the middle a miserable Archivist underneath a bleeding sky that stared at them, unblinking, endlessly curious.

Jon knew the tape recorder was there before it even clicked to record.

“Another one.”

“They aren’t so bad.” Martin picked it up, turned it around, clicked it off, but it clicked back to life immediately after he let go of the button.

Jon just snorted. “Yes, like little pets of an all-seeing fear entity that spies on us.”

“Uhm… yes, sure. I mean”, he motioned to the sink, “we have some pets already, but I guess we can take in some more tape recorders.”

At that, Jon finally managed a smile. It was incredibly soft and came with a fond sigh as he sat up, still on the couch and with no intention to move any time soon.

“So, we can’t get a cat, but we can get a tape recorder?”

Martin put the recorder back down. “I mean… yes? They do follow you around, so it’s not like we are in danger of losing one.”

“They are still manifestations of an eldritch fear monster.”

“I think, we should call this one…”

“Martin?” Jon sat up straighter to actually see and not only Know what Martin was doing there.

“We can call it Elias.” Martin nodded, satisfied with his decision. Then he held up a screwdriver from one of the cupboards and slammed it right through the tape inside. He wiggled it around, making sure to do as much damage as he could. Jon sat there watching and Watching, both impressed and terrified at the same time.

“Right!” Martin gave one particular hard stab, then threw the tape recorder into the fighting arena, that had once been a sink.

Jon shook his head at that. “Did I ever tell you, I love you?”

“You did, actually. Three times in total.”

The Beholding nodded – or rather it agreed and fed the exact times and situations Jon had said it to his brain.

“You’re counting?”

Martin picked up another one of Daisy’s awfully coloured cups. This one he placed on the table in front of Jon.

“Of course.” He leaned over to press a kiss to Jon’s cheek before he went on to grab another teabag and the kettle with still lukewarm water in it.

“You don’t need to, you know? I will always just… Know, I guess. That’s how things work from now on.” Jon just curled into himself, pulling the sleeves of his (Martin’s) jumper over his hands.

“Perfect.” With an unceremonious huff Martin sat down next to him. “That means you will always know when I’m right.”

He leaned forward and poured the lukewarm water into the cup.

“This will taste horrible.”

“It’s not tea, anyway.”

Instead of answering, Martin dumbed the teabag in. Jon still didn’t know why he saw the thing as a teabag at first, too, if it had never been one to begin with. Not enough eyes, was the Beholding’s answer to that one.

“I have enough eyes, thank you very much.”

“You do.” Martin didn’t dare breaking his staring contest with the cup of steeping tea. “I like you with two eyes. I’d like you with seven eyes, too. But it takes away from the crumpled moth look.”

Jon blinked. With two eyes given as he only had those two.

“Crumpled… moth?”

Martin just grinned. Jon saw his grin from his side of the couch and the Beholding gave him the word: ethereal. It dropped into his head as if it was another gruesome death, more horror of fears and loss. But it wasn’t. The light that filtered through the closed curtains was blood and roses, it painted Martin’s freckles like tiny fragments of shattered rubies.

Behind Jon’s eyes, a pressure started to build. It came tears, burning red eyes after a long night, dangerously close, but it lessened as soon as he shifted his gaze from Martin to – surprise! – a new tape recorder on the armrest he had sat on just moments before.

“Ah”, he said, “another one.”

The tape recorder was already running. It lay heavy in Jon’s hand, waiting for something to happen, for what Jon didn’t know. He had an inkling that had nothing to do with his beholding knowledge, but maybe he was just too far gone himself to think straight anymore.

At his side, Martin leaned closer, one hand on his knee, with the other reaching to take the recorder from him. His form was illuminated by the same stark red that had made his freckles seem like red diamond dust. Or something. Jon had somehow already forgotten what simile his head had come up with. Now, bracketed between Martin and the couch’s armrest, with the bleeding light in Martin’s back, Jon found his smile once again.

This was nice. Everything about this was soft. Softer than it had any right to be. The Fears were hard and brutal, their avatars seeking for pain and death, feeding off of human fear. But now, right here, there were only soft touches, soft smiles, and soft words. Soft hearts even.

Jon handed the tape recorder over without any fuss. Right before Martin let it fall to the floor, stepping on it to crack the hard plastic shell and let the magnetic tape spill over his house shoes like curling, black blood, the Beholding gifted Jon another word: Adorable.

Not half as dramatic as the first one, but Jon had no intentions to complain about that. He took simple words over the scenery he knew waited outside. Dreadful. Deadly. But in here, there were only soft touches and Martin’s exhausted sigh as the not tea jumped up and ran off into the general direction of the front door.

“Maybe… now, maybe the problem is…” Martin ran his hand through his hair, letting the stands fall back into his face. His hair had grown out again, after they had come here. It wasn’t nearly as long as Jon’s was by now, but the only reason his fingers didn’t get caught in any knots or twirls was because Jon spend each morning and evening dutifully brushing Martin’s hair after he braided his. It was something so small, so insignificant that it shouldn’t mean anything. Except that it meant everything in that moment and Jon forgot for a short, blissful moment who he was and what he had become, for the sake of simply remembering his hands in Martin’s hair.

This time it was the Beholding that interpreted more into something as the third word it gave him was “exhilarating”.

“Maybe the problem is… the tea.”

“Huh?” Jon blinked rabidly, pulling himself out of his own head.

“It’s the tea.” Martin nodded. “Because we don’t have tea at home.”

Home. What a word. What a beautiful fantasy.

“Does it matter?”

“Yes.” Martin pulled him close enough that he could kiss him on the top of his head. “I’m back in a second. If I’m still gone in… maybe five minutes, just Watch for me.”

Jon had an answer to that. He was silenced by another kiss. And it didn’t feel like the last one, not like a goodbye, farewell, look after yourself without me. It didn’t feel like that because Jon didn’t let it.

He very pointedly didn’t whisper “be safe” when Martin stood up and hurried towards the front door. And he definitely didn’t stare – his eyes glowing acidic green with all his scars just a little more prominent on his dark skin – at the door, ready to bolt up and after Martin if the situation called for it. The Beholding fed him information. More death. Some Pain. Fear, fear, fear.

In the end Martin came back. And Jon scrambled up in a mess of limbs that didn’t feel like his own anymore, before he threw his arms around Martin again.

“You’re back.”

Even Martin breathed a sigh of relieve. “I wasn’t gone that long.”

And Jon Knew and knew that he hadn’t been worried for himself out there.

“Now, you get back on that sofa and I can make us some tea!”

“It won’t be for long.” But Jon let himself fall back onto the sofa nonetheless, breathing in with his nose pushed into Martin’s (his) jumper. It smelled kind and loving, like a helping hand in dire times, it smelled of hope. Somewhere in the back of his mind, the Beholding soaked up the information the same as Jon did. Ever curious.

Martin came back with two cups this time. Both steaming, but both missing a teabag.

“Is this your plan?” Jon raised one eyebrow. “Drinking hot water? Defying the fears by tricking them?”

Martin just grinned again. He handed one cup over to Jon, who took it without a second thought. He had seen those things skitter away, raising scorpion tails dripping with milky white poison, but it was different when Martin handed the cup over like this. Safer, somehow.

“See, the problem was the tea all along.” This time, Martin held his cup in one hand and held up the other arm for Jon to tuck himself under his arm, cuddling closer. He did. Still clutching his tea cup that didn’t turn into a not tea, yet.

“Because we are out of tea.”

Martin nodded. “Well, not anymore.” He took a cautious sip from his tea and nodded again. “It could be better, but I guess it’s not the time for it.”

Jon hesitated for a heartbeat. He looked into his own cup and found two long green leaves on the bottom.

“You took the peppermint leaves.” He looked up at Martin again. “Because those are not corrupted, they are real.”

“At least I, well, I hoped.”

Jon leaned closer, a little further into Martin’s touch. “Hope. What a nice thing when it turns out to be true.”

He took a sip from his peppermint tea. It was plain. Not even nearly done steeping. But it was real, actual tea that wouldn’t jump up and skitter away any time soon. And tomorrow there would be another day, just as there was today. There would be a lot of softness then as well. And tea, Jon suspected.

“It’s not that bad”, Martin said, even though they both knew it was a lie and it was worse than bad.

Jon nodded along. A slow, quiet swirling of tape in a tape recorder came from the empty space next to Martin.

Martin, upon finding said recorder, made a disgusted face. “If this wasn’t the first real tea I had in forever, I would drown this recorder.”

Perfect was not a word Jon had ever used for any part of this mess he had found himself in. The Beholding, however, found a way to drop it into his head anyway. Maybe because “perfect” meant something very different to an eldritch fear entity. Or maybe because the Beholding didn’t understand. And maybe that was why it stuck around. To understand. And of course, to Watch.


End file.
